Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unneccessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.

Above all, worldbuilding is not technically neccessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder’s victim, & makes us very afraid.

The most powerful tool for world-building is layering in references to past events left unexplained. And the biggest disease franchises now suffer from is the compulsive urge to explain EVERY. FUCKING. THING.

"One more thing: Raspberry Pis can be a bit unstable when running over long periods of time, with the repeated writing to the SD cards eventually breaking them. I am running them in read-only mode using OverlayFS, kind of like groundhog day for computers
Beaver"

"This means that you can pull the plug at any moment without the risk of damaging the file systems. We run the whole setup on a simple timer switch. The downside is that if something goes wrong, you can only view the logs until the system is rebooted."